Spektion - Seed Round, $5M

If cybersecurity had a dark web jazz club, Spektion would be the house band, playing riffs your legacy tools can’t even hear. The Austin-based startup just walked out of stealth with a $5M seed round, led by LiveOak Ventures, backed by Tau Ventures and Dauntless Ventures. That’s not pocket change; it’s early validation that the big dogs are circling a serious signal in the noise.

And that signal? It’s runtime intelligence, the stuff your dashboards don’t show you but attackers already know. Spektion isn’t trying to out-CVE the CVE scanners. That game’s tired. They’re doing something more surgical: pulling risk directly from how your software behaves in the wild. Commercial. Open-source. Even that sketchy AI generated code your devs quietly rolled into prod on Friday. If it runs, Spektion reads it. If it’s risky, they’ll catch it before your CISO’s phone lights up at 3 a.m.

The founders? Straight out of the offensive security Hall of Fame. Joe Silva ran global security at JLL and led fraud prevention at TransUnion. Josh Skorich founded Dolos Group, helped build out TransUnion’s red team, and knows the inside of a zero-day like most folks know their inbox. Julien Maladrie, Head of R&D, has burned down attack surfaces across Symantec, JLL, the European Commission, and more. This trio isn’t theorizing threat; they’ve been the threat, and now they’re packaging that muscle into a product that doesn’t just find vulnerabilities. It predicts what matters and proves what breaks.

That’s why they’ve already signed enterprise clients in under a year without a full product suite, without a buzzword-heavy go-to-market. Just pure signal, clean execution, and tech that actually works in the world, not just in a sales deck. They’ve got integrations humming with top-tier detection and response platforms (unnamed, but not unknown), and they’re keeping it lean, <1% infra overhead. Because deadweight belongs in breach post-mortems, not in modern cybersecurity tools.

This 5 million dollar round is gas for the engine. RSA 2025 is next. Spektion is going live at Booth ESE-36, white paper in hand and platform in full view. They’re pushing deeper into AI-driven risk detection, building out remediation workflows, and turning runtime behavior into the new frontline for supply chain security. Creighton Hicks and the LiveOak crew are on board, helping dial up the strategic noise while the product team keeps playing jazz in code.a